Lean back: Songza, ubiquitous listening and Internet music radio for the masses

Abstract

Launched in late 2010, Songza was a small player in the Internet radio universe, available only in the United States and Canada. However, the trade press celebrated Songza for its novel solution to bringing Internet radio to mainstream and profits back to the music industry: ‘lean back’ listening. In June 2014, Google acquired Songza, incorporating its staff, ethos of expert curation, context-sensitive playlists and staunch ‘anti-snobbery’ into Google Play Music, now available in 62 countries and a major competitor in online music. In this article, I investigate how ‘lean back’ listening helped Songza court a wider audience for Internet radio. To do so, I examine how these efforts were framed in the trade press, arguing that Songza’s mass appeal must be understood in relation to histories of domestic ambient music listening, including how it has been devalued and feminized. I also consider the Canadian context, countering how the US context has been generalized in the far from borderless world of streaming music. Ultimately, I argue, Songza’s ‘solutions’ obscured problems involving what happens when music becomes a service; the relation between domesticity, the public and the media; and the place of gender, labour, pleasure and democratic practices in the discussion.

Streaming’s Effects on Music Culture: Old Anxieties and New Simplifications

“… 6. An important article in this and other respects highly relevant to this article is Christina Baade’s (2018) research on the North American phenomenon of ‘internet radio’ (e.g. Songza and Pandora).…”

“…Songza and Pandora). Baade convincingly argues that responses to the pursuit of a mass, non-expert audience by these services need to be understood in the context of histories of domestic music listening, including how ‘domestic ambient [music] listening has been feminized and devalued’ (Baade, 2018: 11).…”

Platforms and Power: A Panel Discussion

“…As I have written elsewhere (Baade, 2018), the logics of music streaming build on those of earlier technologies for domestic, ambient music, while much of the critical literature about music streaming echoes traditions suspicious of "passive" listening and musical "bad taste," often framed in feminized terms. I believe a crucial strategy for critiquing streaming platforms involves being mindful about questions of labour, both for listeners (for whom affordable, effortless listening represents a "solution" to tedium, stress, and the yearning for a better life) and for artists, whose labour has historically been recast as avocation while being exploited by record labels and other industry actors.…”